Atlas Project Close To Completion

On one level, Democrats are falling behind Republicans in preparing for the general election.
Rick Davis, McCain’s election manager, said today that McCain already had paid staff on the ground in battleground states. The campaign has at least one office open – in New Hampshire. Regional campaign managers are working with the Republican National Committee to write plans for two dozen state campaigns.

But Democrats have the Atlas Project.

For more than a year, three of the party’s most respected strategists, Steve Rosenthal, Mary-Beth Cahill and Michael Whouley have spent million to prepare a detailed roadmap on running and winning presidential campaigns in fifteen battleground states. (Chris Cillizza has been the closest chronicler of the AP.) These three and their staff work closely with the Democratic National Committee, state parties, the AFL-CIO and the party’s legacy interest groups to collect very bit of data about previous elections, voting trends, demographics, historic media buys. Then, working with consultants from each of the states, they wrote preliminary election plans. The plans contain more than just vote goals and targeting schemes; they include must-know items like the identities of all the union printers in the states. In Michigan, the plans include the dates of legal hunting seasons and football schedules for the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. “These are the things you need to know to hit the ground running,” Rosenthal said.

The active phase of Atlas Project begins now. Whouley and Cahill are working with the DNC; they’ve already briefed the Democratic presidential campaigns. When the nominee is crowned, he or she will immediately receive access to the project’s detailed vote goal scenarios and voter contact budgets and plans.

The Democrats have never done this before on a national scale – just ask any Kerry-Edwards ’04 state director whether they were handed detailed, integrated, fully updated campaign plans when they scrambled to put their coordinated campaigns together in 2004. Rosenthal will work with outside political groups like the Fund for America and America Votes; the company, he said, has built a firewall to prevent the party from learning about his side of the operation.

The project wrote atlases for 15 states – CO, VA, NH, IA, WI, MN, OH, PA, MI, MO, WV, FL, AZ, NM, and NV – they’ve stopped updating their Arizona database because they expect Sen. John McCain to win.